Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The letter said that they were two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumbers friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next letter.Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is so it goes.

He was talking about the sign that said THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.All knew was that I didnt want my daughter or anybodys child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library, he said. And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.Whats so negative about it? I said.What could be a more negative word than futility? he said.Ignorance, I said.

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.

To be is to do - SocratesTo do is to be - SartreDo Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Here is a lesson in creative writing.First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show youve been to college.And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when Im kidding.For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. Im kidding.We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. Im kidding.If you want to really hurt your parents, and you dont have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. Im not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heavens sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cats cradle is nothing but a bunch of Xs between somebodys hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those Xs . . . And? No damn cat, and no damn cradle.

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, youre a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

Well finish your story anyway.Where was I?The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses.Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed after bed we found dead people.And Father started giggling, Castle continued.He couldnt stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head and do you know what that marvelous man said to me? asked Castle.Nope.Son, my father said to me, someday this will all be yours.

Anyway—because we are readers, we dont have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.

Theres only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, youve got to be kind.

I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.

Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top cant stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.